Among the Mangroves, a Girl Learns to Swim

In a small Colombian village, a mother guides her daughter through a rite of passage.

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In a small Colombian village, a mother guides her daughter through a rite of passage.CreditCreditGuille Isa and Angello Faccini

By Guille Isa and Angello Faccini

Mr. Isa and Mr. Faccini are Latin American filmmakers.

Sept. 18, 2018

Dulce is Spanish for “sweet,” and sweetness is what the 8-year-old protagonist of this film, aptly named Dulce, radiated as she welcomed us to her village, La Ensenada, on Colombia’s Pacific coast. We were there to document the effects of climate change on women in traditional communities, where rising sea levels have made difficult lives even harder. And we decided to center this story on the piangua, a black clam that women in these Afro-Caribbean communities harvest by hand to support their families (the clams are considered a delicacy in nearby Ecuador).

It turned out that Dulce’s mother, Betty Arboleda, was a pianguera. Had she taken her daughter out to join her at work among the mangroves? No, Betty told us — because Dulce could not swim. Luckily for us, this was about to change. A boy had pushed Dulce off a dock a few days before, giving her and her mother a serious scare. Betty was determined: Dulce must learn to swim. So over three days we filmed her doing that, with all the intimate conversations, natural sights and sounds, and Dulce’s unmistakable emotions forming the arc of the story.

Where this story goes from here is uncertain. Rising seas caused by climate change have already washed away several villages upriver from Dulce’s home. We met residents there who had rebuilt their homes two or three times in recent years. They now live in such fear of the tides that they sometimes sleep in their boats.

The region’s dense coastal mangrove forests help absorb destructive tides, but these seaside bulwarks are being chipped away by development and unscrupulous firewood collection. The mangroves are the natural habitat of the piangua, and so protecting one means protecting the other. And now local and international groups are teaming up with residents to reduce piangua harvests in the name of conservation, establish “no-take zones” to allow the piangua populations to recover, and enforce new zoning rules to protect 35,000 acres of mangroves that nurture the pianguas — and secure the coastline against rising seas.

It’s an hour by boat from La Ensenada to the nearest hotel, so we stayed with Betty and Dulce while filming; crew members were guests in houses nearby. While we were there we were struck by the proximity to nature the women of La Ensenada and their families live — for better or, these days, for worse. The shoot illuminated just how climate change will affect the women who live there, and who depend upon these forests for their livelihoods.

Guille Isa is a Lima-based filmmaker whose short documentaries have screened at Hot Docs, Big Sky and other international film festivals.. Angello Faccini is a Colombian director and cinematographer based in Bogotá and Barcelona. He shot “After the Winter,” which was an official Cinéfondation selection at Cannes in 2013.